A friend brought to my attention the Xeno Canto collectlon of bird songs, some 67,000 recordings from 7,147 species representing 67.4% of the planet’s birds.

Thanks to Xeno Canto, I’ve been listening again to the song of the brainfever bird, an eerie, disturbing cry which I last heard fifty years ago as a child in the Western Ghats.

A low wolf-whistle is repeated ever more loudly and shrilly as if the bird is working itself up to a paroxysm of terror or rage. It used to frighten us children we when we were fishing in the forest streams. What had the bird seen? Was a panther lurking in the bushes behind us? A python looping from a branch above?

Mad, completely mad.

These fears were not as ridiculous as they may sound. In 1958, a woodcutter from Bushi village out after a cache of wild honey was killed by a leopard on the same mission.

Then one night my father’s driver Babu, a great hunter, saw two green lamps swaying at head height above a dark forest path. He fired, and a 15 foot python fell to the ground. He brought it back in the boot of the car. I remember the musty stink of it, like a wet dog.

These things, never forgotten, found their way into my novel The Death of Mr Love. The song of the brainfever bird brings them back again.